THE ATTRITION OF POETS IS NOT LIKE THE AUTUMN LEAVES

THE ATTRITION OF POETS IS NOT LIKE THE AUTUMN LEAVES

The attrition of poets is not like the autumn leaves.

Troubled lives. Holding a torch of burning roses

up to the corners of their eyes where the spiders live,

making up flood myths of their sorrows to keep

the deep, lunar watershed of their skull cups full,

happy, sometimes, as an exception to the rule,

but on edge, metallurgists in the Bronze Age

running a sword like the hour hand of a water clock

down their tongues like wavelengths witching for lightning.

Inadequacy, emptiness, abysmal solitude

of undertakers trying to bury corpses on the moon

to put their ghosts to rest under a mythically inflated gravestone

that doesn’t keep the wolf away that isn’t a friend to man.

Poetry is the most compassionate sister spirit

of all the sciences of suffering. It lays a cool, silver herb

on your forehead where the first draft of your fate is written

and the fever abates awhile, and the dream that

boiled in your blood like Japanese seawater

in the nuclear miscarriage of a hurricane rose,

throws snake oil on venomous waters in a toxic mirage

of kingfishers skimming the thought waves of a heart

momentarily at peace with itself. I used to sit

on a precipitious rocky ledge when I was sixteen,

alone with the stars nobody in that neighbourhood

had soiled with their fingerprints yet and at that

remote distance from the world I knew

like a garden that had made a slum of paradise as if

there was nothing original about sin that hadn’t been

plagiarized from the brutal banality of human nature,

poetry whispered to me in an immensely liberated voice

like the rush of the nightwind in the oceanic Douglas firs,

cool waters of life on the peeling skin

of the sunburnt arbutus trees, I am freedom,

I am the horrific beatitude of love within reach of the flesh,

I am the picture music of the mindstream flowing

through the woods at night as if no one were listening

but the nightbirds for the apparitions of their longing

to pierce the apprehensive air with reciprocal urgency.

I am the way out of here for those among the lost

whose path is not blocked by the lifemask they wear

like an identity that hides its face in someone else’s hands.

I speak my secrets to the dead and the living respond

as if they thought they recognized their own voice

calling to them out of the fog like a lamp in a lifeboat

on the moon, so far have they wandered from home.

Eternal sadness in the infinite tenderness

of an immortally wounded muse, I fell in love

with the mystery that made me the nightwatchman of her eyes.

And relativity damned, there’s absolutely no doubt

it’s so much harder to pursue a lunar life to the full

than it is to cut your wrist at the first crescent

when the wheat is green, and the apples are bitter,

and the seed has no faith in the sincerity of the harvest,

and your first step up in a world of artful loveletters

is the stone-faced altar you’re sacrificed upon.

What else in life is there for you to tear your heart out over

and hold it up like a new born as an offering

to the unattainable in the pursuit of an earthly excellence

that doesn’t defame the mediocrities who weren’t

self-destructive enough to risk it all, unendowed

by the white noise of their cosmic backgrounds

to go supernova when galactic occasion called for it.

They weren’t disciplined by disobedience enough

like heretics with fire-breathing principles

to stand up for things that have been burnt to the ground

yet poetry looks over them like a safety net

in a surrealistic circus tent, and one day, shot

out of the chrysalis of the cannon they’re asleep in

they’ll have the courage of dragonflies to fall toward paradise.

Or they’ll cry real tears of gratitude like sacred clowns

who’ve wiped their facepaint off in a green room

without any mirrors to cast more indelible shadows

than the ink of long memories that blacken their hands

like the sooty candelabras of winter trees at dusk.

What’s the point of adding more feathers to your topknot

than the original three, if all you want to be is a chief

in a tribe without fellowship or trust? Poetry

is as meaningless as the night to those who never dream

the inconceivable is talking to them in their sleep.

Do the elders suffer writer’s block when they’re asked

to name the children, each according to their totems?

Who cages the effulgent plumage of the morning

in their voice box and tries to teach it to sing after it

like a fire-hydrant that’s all thumbs on a burning guitar?

Fifty years, a lighthouse on the moon, and the shipwrecks

to prove it, fifty years of lingering in doorways

in this house of life, not knowing whether they were

entrances or exits, but marking the days

like a bone calendar of thresholds and crosswalks

carved on the bars of a penal chop shop

until the incommensurable Sisyphean day I’m released

to join the birds and the stars on the other side of my eyes

where everyone keeps their vow of a omerta

in a house of playing card angels where every saint’s

a martyr to the ungratified desires that drove them

out into the wilderness with a laurel of thorns

hooked on the horns of a scapegoat for what ails the heart,

a grail full of ashes greening this desert of stars,

a dream grammar of ancient mirages

the waters of life call upon to express the evanescence

of the quicksand foundation stones and sand dune pyramids

life is built on like something not meant to last

a starfish longer than literary immortality in an hourglass.

Death and sex. Myriad ghosts at the death

of the imagination that claims maternity by virtue

of the pregnable medium she works in like a procreatrix

fluent in the mother tongues she calls like spirits to a seance,

autumn to a plum, blood and snow to the scarlet letter

of the defrocked cardinal on the dead branch of a tree alphabet,

that endures the immaculate deceptions of renewable virgins

bathing alone in the moonlight of an ice-age that doesn’t prevaricate.

Poetry in the course of time. Like riding in the back

of a pick-up against the current of the aerial perspective

of yellow lines and telephone poles disappearing like the past

into focusing on the void as if there were a point to all this

somewhere far behind you like a destination that kept

receding from you like the light of a star you’ve been following

into the available dimensions of the future not much further ahead

as if it were more illuminating to go along with it than labour

to understand a life in art you’re never going to get used to

though it’s crucial to thank those who stopped for you,

as if you were one of them, and life, like art and love, were on their way.

Dangerous to forestall your life to achieve something

that will either make or break you like third man

on the short straw of a firing squad of nine bullets

certain, and one imaginal blank of doubt that takes

a long shot at the stars in your eyes like a ricochet of light

in the dark we’re all blindfolded by to keep us

from seeing it coming before we have time to duck.

Fifty years of militant farewells to the casualties

of an undeclared holy war between the genies and demons

of what we wish we were born to die for, and the death wish

in the heart of the fire we’re consumed by like a thief

chained to a rock in the Caucasus, like a stem cell

of the eternally recurring madness of repeating the same offence

as if genius were a kind of creative, criminal negligence

that seizes the moment like a spark of life that enlightens

the strawdog of a scarecrow with stars in its eyes.

A shrine for the unrepentant that isn’t a jail or a church.

A school of enlightenment that doesn’t maintain a teacher.

A death lament for the early windfall of unripe bells.

A spider in the niche of a wall after the lamp’s gone out.

So many suicides, burnt offerings to unacceptable gods.

Nothing left to regret or forgive. A lifeboat full of leaves

only the wind on a cold, neurotic night in late November

reads as escapist literature under an erotic brown cover.

Gone. From the light, the dark. The mournful murmuring

of a punctured heart. The cyanotically blue fulfilment

of the second born moon of the month. Crows and worms,

making a living on the gleanings of harvest after

the cattle corn has been shucked and husked with gaps

in the toothy smile on the flyleaf of an undistinguished skeleton.

I lay a sword of moonlight in tribute on the waters of their lives

they have no need to fall upon again or draw

from a stone like a blade stained with coagulant roses of blood.

I cast no aspersions on the failure of pain

to intensify the darkness in their eyes into diamonds

the light passes right through without leaving so much

as cut or a scar. I people their absence with my solitude.

I voice their presence with the silence of poems

written in the expiration of my breath on a broken window.

I embed my eyes like frozen tears in the night skies

of their crystal skulls and I weep like an ice-age of mirrors

that shatter like an uninhabitable vision of life

that can’t be mended once it’s been fully realized

we’re either doomed to succeed, or bound

by the book of life to grandiloquently fail

and how much imagination it takes to write

the Burgess Shale like the natural history

of someone chaotically adaptable enough to the piebald mystery

of the dark abundance, bright vacancy of the shadows and light not to.

PATRICK WHITE